BIE Faculty Roundtable: Improved Cookstoves in Developing Countries
Mission Statement
The University of California Faculty and Students have proved to be global policy leaders, providing important research on the effect of improved stoves in the developing world to combat the problems of indoor air pollution affecting the global poor. Particularly, there are multiple projects on the UC Berkeley campus which share the goal of shifting the 3 billion people now using solid fuels for cooking to safe, clean and efficient alternatives. Potential benefits include reducing the death toll from indoor air pollution of well over 1 million per year and other adverse health effects related to burning of biomass fuels, fighting poverty, reducing deforestation and local air pollution, improving biodiversity, and slowing global climate change. The Berkeley Improved Stoves Coalition supports efforts to build intra-disciplinary synergies to assist policy-makers with rigorous scientific research and evaluation needed to inform the crucial questions of how to provide sustainable scalable solutions for the world’s poor.
Our goals include creating new knowledge, leveraging past research, coordinating information exchange on several substantive topics:
- Understanding user needs and constraints on adoption of improved stoves.
- What are effective designs for new stoves?
- How can we engage thought leaders in the world of public policy towards greenhouse gases in considering how to integrate policy promoting improved stoves?
- What laboratory and field procedures can measure the performance of new stoves and validate measurements and methods to ascertain stove performance in the field. How can we measure the effects of stoves in the field on health, fuel use, emissions, time use, and so forth?
- Designing a low-cost reverse supply chain for improved stoves that conveys valid evidence of the use and effects of improved stoves to the market for carbon credits (and perhaps development credits more broadly); and
- Designing low-cost means for development projects such as improved stoves to access carbon credits (and perhaps development credits more broadly).
Ongoing Projects
1. Darfur Stoves Project
Project Lead: Ashok Gadgil
GSR: Kayje Booker(kayjebooker@gmail.com)
Project Description:The Berkeley-Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with students at the University of California, Berkeley and volunteers from Engineers Without Borders have developed the “Berkeley-Darfur Stove”, a stove four times more fuel efficient than the 3-stone fires traditionally used in Darfur. The Berkeley-Darfur Stove design is based on a systematic survey in Darfur during Nov/Dec 2005 of cooking methods and tools as well as household fuel wood and food needs. The stove has high efficiencies of combustion and heat transfer and is designed to perform well even under the windy conditions common to Darfur. Furthermore, the design is developed so that the stoves can be built and assembled with simple hand tools in Darfur itself. A pilot production facility that currently builds about 100 stoves a week (during good weeks), has proven that the stoves can be produced in Darfur.
The 2.2 million refugees in Darfur need about 300,000 stoves, so the challenge (and the opportunity) is to set up mutiple full scale assembly shops.
Each Berkeley Darfur Stove saves the user family about $250 per year in fuelwood costs (or equivalent labor effort currently expended to collect fuelwood). The stove lasts for five years, and will cost about $20 manufactured in Darfur. So, a Darfur refugee household receiving a Berkeley Darfur Stove immediately experiences a doubling of their disposable income (or earning capacity).
The primary goal of The Darfur Stoves Project is to partner with “on-the-ground” NGOs so they they can assemble and disseminate the stoves to refugees in the Darfur region. The Darfur Stoves Project will provide full technical support to local NGOs to set up a local production facilities that can each produce 100 stoves a day. The dissemination model includes provisions for quality control during manufacture, and continuous improvements in the design of the stove by proactively obtaining user feedback and assessments of stove performance in the field.
In addition to the ongoing engineering and partnership development, the team will develop a sustainable business model that will include production opportunities as part of community development initiatives in Africa. We are also looking at the voluntary carbon market as a potential source of sustainable funding.
Project Funding
Blum Center for Developing Economies, Sustainable Products and Solutions (SPS) Program, Center for Responsible Business, Haas School of Business
Project Partners
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Engineers Without Borders, Greater Good, The Hunger Site
2.Disseminating Efficient Cookstoves in Tanzania
Project Lead:Dan Kammen
GSR: Nils Tomajina (tomijima@berkeley.edu)
Project Description:Over 80% of the energy used by a typical Tanzanian household is for daily cooking and lighting, the main sources of which are wood and charcoal. The indoor air pollution that results from the inefficient combustion of these materials is responsible for 1.5 million deaths per year globally, primarily among women and young children. Low-income households can spend up to 10% of their income on energy services, primarily for cooking. Finally, up to 500,000 hectares are deforested in Tanzania each year; to which the consumption of wood for fuel may contribute. Efficient, cleaner cookstoves have the potential to simultaneously lower indoor air pollution exposure, reduce fuel cost, and slow deforestation. As a low cost technology that uses available fuels, improved cookstoves can be locally made and purchased by households without subsidies. Households can recoup the additional cost of the improved stoves within two weeks. The “KUUTE” stove, developed in Tanzania and made by local artisans, is twice as efficient as prevalent improved charcoal stoves. However, many well- engineered stoves have failed to impact livelihoods, as they are not adopted by households. The Blum Center is supporting research on cost-effective dissemination methods. Uptake of the stoves will be measured using innovative contracts and guarantees. The results will be used to focus the diffusion of the KUUTE stoves in Tanzania.
Project Funding
Blum Center for Developing Economies, Rocca Pre-Dissertation Summer Research Award
Project Partners
Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology
3. Climate and Health Co-Benefits: Carbon Finance for Improved Cookstoves in China
Project Lead:Kirk Smith
GSR: Jimmy Tran(jimtran@berkeley.edu)
Project
Description: This project seeks to address critical barriers to the widespread adoption of improved household cookstoves in impoverished regions of western
China. The SPS Award is helping to move our existing China stove project, funded by the USEPA and Wuppertal Institute, from a pilot phase to a sustainable and replicable business model that utilizes the international carbon financing to promote high-performing cost-effective stoves that have been developed by Chinese entrepreneurs
and tested by our team during a 2006-7 national stove competition in China. We are delivering high-quality carbon offsets to the voluntary carbon market by utilizing both a recently accepted Gold Standard Methodology for valuing carbon offsets from improved cookstoves that was designed in collaboration with our team here at
UCB, and new monitoring technologies currently being developed by our research group. These techniques are enabling us to conduct rigorous field experiments, surveys, and market analyses to demonstrate quantifiable health, environmental, economic, and social “co-benefits” from large-scale dissemination of improved cookstoves in China, focusing first on coal, which is widely used in rural areas. This work will also help guide the development of future carbon market standards towards valuing rural energy development opportunities with the most cost-effective and attractive co-benefits. Project Funding: Sustainable Products & Solutions (SPS) Program Center for Responsible Business, Haas School of Business
Project Partners: Center for Entrepreneurship in International Health and Development (CEIHD), Berkeley Air, China Association of Rural Energy Industry (CAREI)
Project PI: David I. Levine Graduate Student Project Lead: Theresa Beltramo (tbeltramo@berkeley.edu) Almost half the world burns wood and other biomass for cooking and other purposes. These stoves cause roughly 1.6 million premature deaths every year. Burning biomass also leads to deforestation and a high burden of time for collecting wood. Burning biomass also releases CO2 and other greenhouse gases and, thus, is a leading contributor to global climate change. Improved stoves in the developing world have the potential to reduce all of these problems. Importantly, several mechanisms already
exist and new ones are evolving for rich nations to subsidize improved stoves that reduce greenhouse gases for poor nations through the carbon credit market. The goals of this project are: The Randomized controlled trial is a phased intervention which measures the impacts on two groups-control and treatment- for a total of 1000 households in 20 rural villages in the Thies region in Senegal. The impact evaluation consists of three surveys at the following intervals in time: Core Impacts Measured by the Rigorous Evaluation: Project Funding:
4. Improved Stoves for Health and Environmental Sustainability- An Impact Evaluation of a Solar Oven Initiative in Senegal
Project Partners:
Tostan Senegal, Solar Household Energy
5.CEIHD – Climate Care: Efficient Cooking with Ugastoves
Project Lead
Matt Evans(matt_evans@mba.berkeley.edu)
Project Description
A carbon financed improved cookstove project focused on urban charcoal stoves and institutional stoves.
Project Funding
JP Morgan Climate Care
Project Partners
Uganda Stove Manufacturing, JP Morgan Climate Care
6. Impact Evaluation of an Improved Cookstove Program Among Rural Communities in Northern Ghana
Project Lead
David Levine and Robert Van Buskirk
Graduate Student Lead:
Jason Burwen
Project Description
In northern Ghana, nearly all households rely on fuelwood for cooking. Besides accelerating local deforestation and emitting carbon, the use of fuelwood is also responsible for high levels of indoor air pollution and may be contributing substantially to respiratory health problems, especially for children under 5. Alternative energy sources, such as LPG, are prohibitively expensive, and poor infrastructure makes makes access to improved materials and technologies challenging.
This project, a collaboration between Plan Ghana, the Ghanaian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and UC Berkeley, investigates the effectiveness of an improved cookstove program that combines knowledge transfer and locally available materials. Utilizing woman-to-woman trainings on stove construction and proper stove usage, we have implemented 1000 stoves in eight villages in the Sissala West district of the Upper West region of Ghana.
During the implementation (February - April 2009), we carried out a randomized-control field trial to measure:
* the fuelwood use of women cooking on the improved stove
* the exposure of women to smoke during such controlled cooking tests
* the household usage patterns of multiple stoves (both improved and traditional)
We also recorded geographical information to map villages and carried out a questionnaire of participants to measure self-reported recent health, recent cooking activity, wood collection behavior, and household characteristics. Using this information, we expect to:
* extrapolate out and quantify the long-term usage and impact of improved cookstoves
* understand some of the factors contributing to impact
* increase the likelihood of and facilitate the process for successful carbon finance from the voluntary market
* explore "health crediting" as a potential avenue of financing
A follow-up is planned for December 2009 to ascertain whether adoption patterns and impact persist over time. Furthermore, lessons learned from this study will be used to prepare a business plan for scaling up the intervention to the entire Upper West region.
Project Partners
Ghanaian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Plan Ghana
Closed Projects
Randomized Exposure Study of Pollution Indoors and Respiratory Effects (RESPIRE)
Approximately half of the world's population relies on biomass (wood, dung, crops) and coal for their household energy needs. This results in very high levels of indoor air pollution to which women and young children are exposed daily. Exposure to indoor air pollution has been shown to be associated with acute respiratory infections in children, particularly pneumonia, which is still the most important cause of death globally in children under 5 years of age.
RESPIRE led by Dr. Kirk Smith in the Western Highlands of Guatemala was designed to better understand the relationship between acute respiratory infections in children and exposure to indoor air pollution. To do this, we chose several communities that are well suited for such a study and have installed an improved cookstove called a plancha in half of the participating households. We examined acute respiratory infections (ARI) in children 18 months of age over a 2 year period to see if there was a difference in the incidence of ARI in children who have the plancha compared to children who do not have the plancha. We measured levels of pollution in households that have the plancha and those without the plancha. After completing the study, all participating households received a plancha.
Additional Weblinks:http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/guat/page.asp?id=03c
http://www.aprovecho.net/stoves/
http://www.bioenergylists.org/en/stoves
http://www.pciaonline.org/site/c.krLWJ7PIKqG/b.2660445/
http://www.hedon.info/goto.php/index.htm
http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/krsmith/
http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/krsmith/page.asp?id=10
http://rael.berkeley.edu